Dangerous risks of W76-1/Mk4A with new AFS

“Russia has no satellite launch detection systems? What moron wrote this? The Russian nuke missiles are almost brand new and increasingly road or rail mobile Topol-Ms developed during the 1990s and fielded started from the mid to late 2000s. USN Tridents while deadly and with low warning time if launched from N Atlantic are 20+ years old, despite upgrades to the Ohio boats. The WY/ND/SD/MT based Minutemen III’s which replaced the START phased out MX Peacekeepers are mid 1980s vintage and more geographically clustered than their Russian silo counterparts which are more spread out.”

and a link to the Business Insider’s Alex Lockie: US nukes just got a lot deadlier — and experts say it could cause Russia to attack!!!

Wow, breathtaking…

The article grabs your attention from the beginning: “A recent report from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists details how the US massively upgraded the lethality of its submarine-based nuclear missiles.”

“Because of this new “super fuze,” or timing element that ensures that each and every single missile will explode at precisely the right moment .” That’s why these missiles could be “used to wipe out Russia’s nukes buried deep underground.”

“Because of improvements in the killing power of US submarine-launched ballistic missiles, those submarines now patrol with more than three times the number of warheads needed to destroy the entire fleet of Russian land-based missiles in their silos.”

“But the US has even bigger nukes which sit in missile silos underground as ICBMs. Historically, these missiles would have been used for destroying Russia’s ICBMs, but since submarines can handle that now, the US can focus its big nukes on obliterating underground hardened nuclear shelters — the kind Kremlin officials would hide out in during an attack.”

Aha, this threat is personally for President Putin, isn’t it?

At the end Alex Lockie quotes NASA: “(Without eyes in space, Russia would have to answer a very difficult question very quickly if they detected an incoming missile. NASA)”

As an illustration of the American superiority Alex Lockie provides an image of nimbus B1, a NASA satellite.

According to a book Space and Nuclear Weaponry in the 1990’s edited by Carlo Schaerf, Giuseppe Longo, David Carlto, the American Nimbus-B1 meteorological satellite plunged into the Pacific Ocean in May 18, 1968.

I didn’t know what “fuze” was, left alone “super-fuze,” so I looked it up.

Turns out, fuze is a detonator, and a super fuze in this content would be detonator with a pre-set clock. “A time delay element used with a contact fuze permits the warhead to penetrate the target before detonation.”

The revelation that without this super-fuze the US warheads denote at random struck me as dumb.

Before I read the report, I checked to see what is the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists?

Their domain name thebulletin.org and they share IP 104.24.12.73 with this domain:

They seems to have a huge grudge against President Trump.

On Dec 16, 2016, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reported that Trump was “In denial: on both climate and intelligence,” and on Jan 26, 2017 they reported with the reference to the Washington Post that “The Doomsday Clock just advanced, ‘thanks to Trump’: It’s now 2 ½ minutes to “midnight,” according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which warned Thursday that the end of humanity may be near.”

Their mission statement : “The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists informs the public about threats to the survival and development of humanity from nuclear weapons, climate change.”

In essence, it’s sort of like the Farmer’s Almanac, only much less useful.

So, I went and read the report titles, “How US nuclear force modernization is undermining strategic stability: The burst-height compensating super-fuze”

The report is written by Hans M. Kristensen, a director of the Nuclear Information Project with the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) in Washington, DC.

Matthew McKinzie, a director of the Nuclear Program of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) in Washington, DC.

Theodore A. Postol, a physicist and a professor of science, technology, and national security policy at MIT.

The following are excerpts from the report

“that program has implemented revolutionary new technologies that will vastly increase the targeting capability of the US ballistic missile arsenal. This increase in capability is astonishing—boosting the overall killing power of existing US ballistic missile forces by a factor of roughly three—and it creates exactly what one would expect to see, if a nuclear-armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike.”

“improvements in the killing power of US submarine-launched ballistic missiles, those submarines now patrol with more than three times the number of warheads needed to destroy the entire fleet of Russian land-based missiles in their silos.“

“US submarine-based missiles can carry multiple warheads, so hundreds of others, now in storage, could be added to the submarine-based missile force, making it all the more lethal.”

“The revolutionary increase in the lethality of submarine-borne US nuclear forces comes from a “super-fuze” device that since 2009 has been incorporated into the Navy’s W76-1/Mk4A warheads.“

“Because the innovations in the super-fuze appear, to the non-technical eye, to be minor, policymakers outside of the US government (and probably inside the government as well) have completely missed its revolutionary impact.“

Aha… Now, we are getting somewhere.

Here comes the punchline:

“The result of this fuzing scheme is a significant increase in the probability that a warhead will explode close enough to destroy the target even though the accuracy of the missile-warhead system has itself not improved.”

So, they make it clear that “the accuracy won’t improve,”it’s a “probability” that will increase.

Why do they publish this?

“This vast increase in US nuclear targeting capability, which has largely been concealed from the general public, has serious implications for strategic stability and perceptions of US nuclear strategy and intentions.”

Translating into English, this propaganda piece intends to improve the perceptions of US nuclear strategy and intention.

What reaction do they want to get from Russia?

“Russian planners (?) will almost surely see the advance in fuzing capability as empowering an increasingly feasible US preemptive nuclear strike capability—a capability that would require Russia to undertake countermeasures.”

Clearly, before this “analysis” the US missiles had no targeting capability, now they have “an increased probability,” so those mystical “Russian planners” will have to scramble for “countermeasures!!!”

A casual observer would ask, “Why would Russia be required to undertake countermeasures now? Doesn’t it have a anti-missile systems like the Don-2N, a stationary multi-purpose all-round surveillance centimeter-range radar station capable to capable of detecting an ICBM warhead at a distance of 3,700 km and at an altitude of 40,000 km.?”

“The Russian Space Surveillance System (SSS) employs a variety of ground-based radars and electro-optical sensors in and outside of the Russian Federation and maintains a satellite database similar to that of the United States.”

But the three “experts” seems to know better. They agree that Russia has radars, but…

“Russia does not have a functioning space-based infrared early warning systembut relies primarily on ground-based early warning radars to detect a US missile attacs, these radars cannot see over the horizon,”

“The inability of Russia to globally monitor missile launches from spacemeans that Russian military and political leaders would have no “situational awareness”

So, let’s see how the new accuracy-enhancing fuze works.

“The significant increase in the ability of the W76-1/Mk4A warhead to destroy hardened targets—including Russian silo-based ICBMs—derives from a simple physical fact: Explosions that occur near and above the ground over a target can be lethal to it.”

This fuse program goes way back, April 1997, Strategic Systems Program director Rear Adm. George P. Nanos publicly explained that “just by changing the fuze in the Mk4 reentry body, you get a significant improvement.”

By 1998, the fuze modernization effort became a formal project, with five SLBM flight tests planned for 2001-2008.

Full-scale production of the super-fuze equipped W76-1/Mk4A began in September 2008, with the first warhead delivered to the Navy in February 2009.

By the end of 2016, roughly 1,200 of an estimated 1,600 planned W76-1/Mk4As had been produced, of which about 506 are currently deployed on ballistic missile submarines.

Approximately 3,250 W76 warheads were produced between 1978 and 1988. The weapons armed the Poseidon C3 and Trident I C4 and currently the Trident II D5 missiles (together with about 400 W88 warheads). A modified W76 also arms Trident II missiles on British submarines. With the service life limit of the oldest units approaching, the Clinton administration in the late 1990s ordered a W76 Life Extension Program (LEP) to extend the service life for another 30 years. Major milestones for the program are:

· January 30, 2017. Anxiety Mounts at National Labs Over Future of Climate Research. “Nothing saves you if the budget is cut,” Foster said. … whose district includes Sandia National Laboratories and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory;

“The anticipated cuts in the Trump proposal would reduce federal spending by $10.5 trillion over ten years. The proposal recommends funding reductions in “nuclear physics and advanced scientific computing research”, exactly the kind of research both LANL and Sandia specialize in. It is worth noting that federal spending cuts to New Mexico labs would primarily affect people represented by Democrats.”

!!!

I rest my case.

Featured image: Nothing that the US super-fuze duck tape cannot fix, from nukes to erection.

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50 Comments

So, these US government representatives are pleased that the Russian government won’t be sure if it is being attacked – and that therefore the chance of a Russian counter-strike, justified or otherwise, has increased?

I wish they would replace those people with wombats or something relatively intelligent.

Mr. Welsh, you are quite mistaken in your belief that Kristensen, McKinzie, and Postol are “pleased that the Russian government won’t be sure if it is being attacked.” These scientists have all worked tirelessly for years in their efforts to prevent nuclear war and inform us of the dangers presented by nuclear arsenals.

Scott’s desire to paint the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists as a tool of the Deep State seems to have blinded him to the importance of what these scientists have said. This is not a factually devoid propaganda piece from the NY Times or WashPost. I will copy some references below that more thoroughly explain and outline the history and technical basis of concern for these “upgrades”, which in fact are modernizations that create *new* and much more dangerous weapons.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists began publishing articles back in 2000 about the dangers of the “upgrades’ to the W76 and the missiles that carry them. See the article by Greg Mello, entitled “That Old Designing Fever” http://www.lasg.org/ThatOldDesigningFever.pdf Mello described the massive increase in accuracy that occurred when the C4 Trident missiles were replaced with D5 missiles, combined with the “upgraded” super-fuse. This increased accuracy allowed war-planners (and yes, there are war-planners in both the US and Russia) to consider the “upgraded” W76 to have achieved a hard-target capability that it previously lacked. Accuracy previously believed only possible for land-based ICBMs was acquired by the SLBMs.

Theodore Postol is the leading expert in the US on Ballistic Missile Defense. He has been a critic of BMD for years, see his article entitled, “Upsetting the Reset: The Technical Basis of Russian Concern Over NATO Missile Defense” published by the Federation of American Scientists https://fas.org/pubs/_docs/2011%20Missile%20Defense%20Report%20-%20lowres.pdf Postol makes it clear that Russian concerns about BMD were based in fact, not simply propaganda.

— Early warning system has no space-based component.
— Russia has substantial nuclear forces and fixed ground-based missile silos that can now be destroyed by the US submarine launched ballistic missiles (and US ICBMs as well).
— Nuclear arms reductions with the United States will only increase Russia’s vulnerabilities to a US nuclear first-strike.
— Russians remember that the US has repeatedly not been helpful in providing for Russian early warning.
— The US supported the Latvian government when it demanded that Russia close down a new early warning radar that was covering major attack orders from United States.
— The US is now drastically increasing the ability of all its submarine-launched ballistic missile warheads to destroy Russian silo-based forces and command centers. These improvements will free up many US nuclear weapons that would have otherwise been dedicated to that mission.
— The US relentless and irrational preoccupation with global missile defenses is seen by the Russians as yet another US program aimed at reducing Russia’s ability to retaliate after a US nuclear first-strike.
— The Russian analysis of US modernization programs and behavior can only lead them to conclude that the United States is trying to create an option to fight and win a nuclear war against Russia.
— The US nuclear weapons modernization program is unambiguously oriented toward achieving these goals.

Potential Consequences

— The Russians have no space-based satellite early warning systems to alert them to the launch of US nuclear-armed ballistic missiles from the ocean.
— The Russians may be in the process of trying to reconstitute a primitive and limited spacebased system that could with some reliability observe the launch of US land-based missiles.
— However, the most capable ballistic missile systems are now on submarines, which have warheads of much higher killing power and can be launched from unmonitored locations in the ocean.
— Since the US has been improving its capability to preemptively attack Russia, the only choice the Russians have is to streamline their decision-making capabilities.
— Because the Russians cannot see over the curved-earth horizon with space-based satellite This means there warning time could be a short as 10 to 15 minutes.
— The only way to guarantee the ability to launched before Russian forces are destroyed by a preemptive US attack this if some method of pre-delegated launch authority is put in place.
— The response times of the streamlined launch authority are by necessity very short.
— The time-pressure to take actions can, in crisis, greatly increase the chances of an accidental launch Russian central strategic nuclear forces.
— Thus, the US Nuclear Weapons Modernization Program is pushing the Russians to take actions that could, in a crisis, lead to a massive accident that could well destroy most of the countries in the northern hemisphere.

Yes but the “scientists” have forgotten to mention that Russia is in the process of deploying the the latest tech surveillance satellites. Theyve had them since the 1970s, so Im sure the new ones will be good.
They also forgot that the Russians are deploying the new generation land base radar system that will be able to see both the East & West coasts of the US. Both these systems will be fully operational by 2020. Not much time left for the US to make their preemptive strike.
The “scientists” also forgot that the Russians also have submarines with the latest generation missiles on board. It will take a brave or more correctly “stupid” US President to think he can sneakily take out all of Russia land based missiles and then be able to handle 700 odd Russian sub based nuclear warheads coming back. 10% of those would be more than enough to turn all of the US to ash. Whats the risk reward here?

“Scott’s desire to paint the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists as a tool of the Deep State”
Scott made a big mistake here, this is that simple. His analysis is simply bad, and this is not the first time he’s missed the mark. Unfortunately, these scientists have merit, you can’t just dismiss them as some kind of daydreaming fools. Furthermore, these are serious questions that need serious treatment, not Scott’s stupidity (sorry for being rude, this whole article is so annoying).

With all the politicizing around this super-fuze modernization, there is some actual physics behind the increase in destructive-capability. It is noted that the actual trajectory of the missile/reentry-vehicle does not change. This is true. What supposedly does change with the super-fuze is the ability to initiate the explosion at the ‘optimum’ moment…

The key here is that an air-burst-design RV has to detonate in the air. If it hits the ground, it just goes ‘crunch’. So, the designers have to back-off to an altitude-of-detonation that makes sure the RV goes ‘boom’ in the air. Each fuze can guarantee only a certain ‘window’ of detonation time. Therefore, the designers have to back-off the detonation height to beyond the uncertainties of the fuze. Otherwise, a possible ‘thud’ rather than a ‘boom’.

With the previous fuze, there was supposedly a broader ‘window’ within-which the device would trigger. This corresponds to a broader altitude-column above the target, resulting in the designers having to back-off the detonation-height to above a possible ‘thud’ range.The resulting detonation-point could be hundreds or even thousands of feet above the target, considering that the reentry vehicle is approaching the target at a high Mach number.

Anything that could narrow the fuze ‘window’ would allow the designers to drop the RV closer to the surface, while retaining ‘boom’ over ‘thud’.

While the political aspect is stupid, the physics of the fuze-modernization COULD be real…

Very muchly correctly explained, I especially liked the highly technical terms of “thud” and “boom”. I would have termed a “thud” – a “splat”, but ok :)

It just makes me wonder why did it take them 60 years to make a better fuze, and also – what makes them think that Russians (or Chinese) would not be aware of effects of “nukilar booms” at various altitudes and a) hide their bunkers better b) bury their bunkers deeper c) reinforce their bunkers “sum moar”, etc?

Also, the assumption that Russians (or Chinese) don’t have certain particular observation equipment (IR) on their satellites to detect ICBM launches or to track nuclear submarines under water is a bit childish. You can buy a cheap home security cameras that have some IR capability thrown in, and the idea that someone would spend squillions to launch a bunch of spy satellites and not spend $100 extra for a decent camera is idiotic.

You shouldn’t mock things you don’t understand. The terminal velocity for ICBM warheads are in the hypersonic range, something like Mach 7-15, depending on the model. It means 2 km/s on minimum. One second means at least 2 km, and for killing ICBM silos, you need to explode your bomb at a specific (and quite low) height. In other words, fuzing does matter, and apparently, it is quite far from trivial.

Sorry for being a bit rude, but you apparently don’t know what you’re talking about. These are serious matters, we have to have a serious take on them.

“Also, the assumption that Russians (or Chinese) don’t have certain particular observation equipment (IR) on their satellites to detect ICBM launches”
This is not at all something outlandish. Russia (and China) surely has an early warning network (and satellites) but for correct functioning they need a certain number of them (they don’t have), with proper sensors, and this is not like another 100 bucks accessory. Most IR sensors operate at very low temperature etc.

“or to track nuclear submarines under water is a bit childish.”
Now this is really a silly comment, it is very hard (and currently virtually impossible) to reliably track nuclear submarines. Even simple detection is problematic.

On detecting ICBM launches, I think that satellites and such are entirely unnecessary. (The Soviets and Chinese cottoned-on to this low-tech ‘solution’ long ago.)

Simply mount a staring infrared camera onto some building/tree/fence/outhouse close to an ICBM field. When the missiles launch, the camera will give launch-warning as fast as a satellite. Perhaps faster. Install a couple-hundred of these around an ICBM field, and you can detect ICBM launches for say 100k dollars rather than 100B dollars.

You don’t even need to try to detect sub ‘boomer’ launches, because – if the ICBM field launches – you can be damn sure the sub missiles are on their way…

Correct. The “super-fuze” is the “Z-axis” equivalent of reducing the “X-Y axis” Circle of Error, but is much simpler to execute as it acts only in 1 dimension. If the missile is off-course on its “X-Y” coordinates, making the Z-axis hyper-accurate will have minimal effect, and may even be counter-productive (if one can use such a term here).

At the end of the day, it’s really just a desperate play for more money. It sounds very high-tech to the semi-literates that issue those life-blood dollars, but it’s really little more than a make-work project that keeps Sandia/Livermore alive.

Institutions are as reluctant to die as living beings. Just watch the CIA in the coming months, as it fights for its life like a cornered wolverine.

An Off-Topic aside…
Something has changed recently in the Saker site’s. The site now loads very slowly. Apparently the difficulty is in getting the cloudfront.net site to respond to requests, and in fact it seems to never respond. Net result is I get an almost text-only page after several minutes. This is in both Opera and Firefox. Has the coding changed?

Erebus, to answer the ‘slowness’ question, you (and the website maintainers) might want to visit the Jim Stone site (82.221.129.208). He has talked about the ability of ‘adversaries’ to disable a website through ‘hanging-up’ some site or service called by the website. To the observer, the website just appears to hang or load very slowly. This is a ‘soft kill’ method of taking-down that website, as the observer impatiently-moves to the next location. (You may have to search for the info, as JS’s site has been under attack forever – resulting in a chaotic look. The right sidebars might lead to the warnings, or you might have to search on relevant terms from outside the JS site.)

By the way, I have noticed this ‘behavior’ on The Saker site lately, too…

If you can please provide time and general location when you have response time issues. Just tested here in California and I found no problems. Two days ago we had a database slowness issue but it was resolved in about 1 hours … times, dates and location will be helpful in tracking down response time issues. … mod-hs

Moderator,
Times? Every time, at every hour of the day or night. On all devices, running either Opera or Firefox as well as the native Android browser.

I believe the primary issue lies in getting to the cloud from my location. I note the following msgs show up in the bottom corner of the screen:
“Looking for dxczjjuegupb.cloudfront.net” and “Connecting to dxczjjuegupb.cloudfront.net”.
Looking takes a long time, and it seems connecting never actually happens.

Just a few thoughts/questions: Since getting the maximum performance from the weapon requires a very precise burst altitude (height, technically), how does the fuze know what that height should be? The barometric pressure over the target varies as the weather changes, so normal density altitude sensors are not going to be accurate enough, especially as the velocity is very large. I guess the old way was to accept the innaccurcy and raise the burst altitude to cover all possibilities and accept reduced performance.

it’s just coupling the gadget to the target – complex radiation cascades – but yes, for maximum transfer one wants a shaped charge and precise timing…max transfer E

The shaped nuclear charge was invented by everybody, but it called teller-ulam in fusion uses, where it can make 73 million bar of radiation pressure. However a boosted primary can be coupled to a shaped charge that directs substantial fraction of the primary into a focused cone. Past that is verboten to speak of, but obvious in blowing holes in things…

What is, I think, not appreciated is jetted nuke… I use term loosely..

Ted Taylor, gadget designer, built some jetted nukes for an experiment series… for spaceflight…

Idea is max gamma from optomised gadget created a jet of plasma from a shaped charge of plastic that’s mostly H without the electron – and the shaped charge makes a plasma jet. Taylor invented it to blast against the greasy plastic – smeared over a very strong steel “pusherplate” mounted on giant shock absorber on a 500 ton spaceship. Project Orion is name. The details are deep secrets… eta mars earth 2 weeks each way, single 500 ton stage. they planned to take a bulldozer…

Is obvious that a gadget can be built that would create a jet of plasma nearly instantly at near ground – meters away – and that no material whatsoever could stop that jet from burning a hole in the earth.

A very deep hole.

I have no idea if the learned boffins have done it, but the physics is compelling and the money would be provided…so I assume everybody has a pretty good idea about how to do it, and probably has done. It’s really pretty easy…

I think you are very mistaken if you believe that they are bankrupting themselves with the outrageous military (not defence!) spending (apparently more than the rest of the world combined).

Military spending has no limits, or rather, it depends on the capacity of all military establishments and associated private contractors to consume it. Its function is not to provide the resources that that country needs but to transfer huge amounts of taxpayers money to the shareholding elite from the Big Generals (Dynamics, Electric, Motors) to Boeing and many others.

You should also be aware that the US budget is also limitless; they just pile up the trillions in debt for ever and ever. The accumulated Federal debt and current liabilities are impossible to be met physically, so they just go on on a merry-go-round of printing more money (actually issuing more Treasure credit notes) to the end of time. As long as the financial cabal props up the dollar and the military keeps the world under control (which both do because they are in it) there is no danger of ever the US going bankrupt. Until the US$ loses its privileged position of trade and currency reserve, and also the new status of tax/account haven for the world’s ill-gotten money.

The super fuze won’t do the UK much good. Only one out their six nuclear deterrent submarines is operational at any one time. Then the missiles they carry have a high failure rate, something the UK government kept from UK Parliament during a crucial vote on extra funding.

The Neocons think they could win a nuclear war against Russia to create “a postwar world order compatible with Western values”.

“Victory is Possible
by Colin S. Gray and Keith Payne
…
If American nuclear power is to support U.S. foreign policy objectives, the United States must possess the ability to wage nuclear war rationally.
…
Surely no one can be comfortable with the claim that a strategy that would kill millions of Soviet citizens and would invite a strategic response that could kill tens of millions of U.S. citizens would be politically and morally acceptable. However, it is worth recalling the six guidelines for the use of force provided by the “just war” doctrine of the Catholic Church: Force can be used in a just cause; with a right intent; with a reasonable chance of success; in order that, if successful, its use offers a better future than would have been the case had it not been employed; to a degree proportional to the goals sought, or to the evil combated; and with the determination to sparre noncombatants, when there is a reasonable chance of doing so.
…
Small, preplanned strikes can only be of use if the United States enjoys strategic superiority — the ability to wage a nuclear war at any level of violence with a reasonable prospect of defeating the Soviet Union and of recovering sufficiently to insure a satisfactory postwar world order.
…The United States should plan to defeat the Soviet Union and to do so at a cost that would not prohibit U.S. recovery. Washington should identify war aims that in the last resort would contemplate the destruction of Soviet political authority and the emergence of a postwar world order compatible with Western values.
…
Strategists cannot offer painless conflicts or guarantee that their preferred posture and doctrine promise a greatly superior deterrence posture to current American schemes. But, they can claim that an intelligent U.S. offensive strategy, wedded to homeland defenses, should reduce U.S. casualties to approximately 20 million, which should render U.S. strategic threats more credible. If the United States developed the targeting plans and procured the weapons necessary to hold the Soviet political, bureaurcratic, and military leadership at risk, that should serve as the functional equivalent in Soviet perspective of the assured-destruction effect of the late 1960s.”http://home.earthlink.net/~platter/articles/80-summer-payne.html

“If the United States launched a nuclear attack against Russia (or China), the targeted country would be left with a tiny surviving arsenal — if any at all. At that point, even a relatively modest or inefficient missile-defense system might well be enough to protect against any retaliatory strikes, because the devastated enemy would have so few warheads and decoys left.”https://archive.is/YeFbf

I must disagree with those think tankers who believe that the US could neutralize Russian nuclear forces and “win a nuclear war”. Russia still has the dead-hand or perimetr system of automatic launch upon attack. Furthermore, much of their strategic missile inventory is on mobile launchers and even more in the case of tactical nuclear warheads.

“The Russian Federation officially claims to have 1400 nuclear warheads associated with 473 deployed strategic launchers of various types, although other estimates place that number somewhere between 1500 and 1700 warheads. The Americans, for their part, have 1,585 warheads deployed on 778 launchers.” Russia maintains another 2,000+ tactical nuclear weapons (Iskander, torpedo, aerial, artillery and cruise missile delivery vehicles) to counteract the French and UK nuclear weapons and the 300 or so US tactical nuclear weapons left in Europe.http://www.scout.com/military/warrior/story/1757643-russian-nuclear-weapons-101

Unfortunately, almost all US military leaders and politicians are linear thinkers and also cannot recognize the escalation feedback loop of an arms race (See Peter Senge- The Fifth Discipline). To ignore this warning is to abandon America to that described in the quote: “Prussia is not a country which has an army, but an army which is a country”

Many of these US generals also believe that a nuclear war can actually be won. The full scale nuclear war models that predict the nuclear winter aftermath of a nuclear war appear to have even been rejected by John Holdren, the Senior Advisor to President Barack Obama on Science and Technology or Rose Gottemoeller, the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security and the US Nuclear Weapons Council:https://fas.org/2017/01/turning-a-blind-eye-towards-armageddon-u-s-leaders-reject-nuclear-winter-studies/

Nuclear detonations create blast energy (50%), nuclear radiation (15%) and thermal radiation (35%). In the case of a full-scale nuclear war a few high altitude bursts would be used to wipe out unshielded electrical devices and electrical transmission systems. Air bursts 1-3 km height would be used to incinerate population centers. Near surface (<500m) nuclear fireballs will not only be used on hardened military targets but also nuclear reactors, spent fuel storage ponds, and nuclear waste storage tanks (e.g. 165 million gallons of high level nuclear waste at Hanford). A few weapons would also be used to take out ships and submarines at sea using hunter-killer (black hole) submarines.

Environmental effect vary with height of detonation:
(1) High altitude bursts generate oxides of nitrogen as well;
(2) air bursts generate oxides of nitrogen, soot and various oxidized products of combustion which rise by convection into the upper atmosphere yielding the nuclear winter effect. For airburst nuclear effects see: http://www.nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/;
(3) near surface detonations atomize a lot of irradiated inorganic material (e.g. soil, rock, metal, nuclear fuel rods) but less soot. This leads to a lot of localized radiation but much less upper atmosphere soot. A 20-MT surface burst is estimated to produce a crater 0.16 mi deep in soil or 0.12 mi deep in rock. The radius of the crater lip for a weapon of this yield is 0.65 mi in soil or 0.52 mi in rock. https://www.fourmilab.ch/bombcalc/instructions.html;
(4) Nuclear detonation in seawater yield oxides of nitrogen and sulfur, hot water, steam and radioactive sodium-24 with a half-life of 15 hours.

In closing, the nuclear winter aftermath of a full scale nuclear war would be far worse than even modelled by Alan Robock and Owen Brian Toon in their article:
“Self-assured destruction: The climate impacts of nuclear war” http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/RobockToonSAD.pdf due to factors they left out of their model. Besides, the dead would not have to suffer like the billions of survivors who would generally suffer a slow death from years of global cooling, disease and radiation poisoning.

I must disagree with those think tankers who believe that the US could neutralize Russian nuclear forces and “win a nuclear war”. Russia still has the dead-hand or perimetr system of automatic launch upon attack. Furthermore, much of their strategic missile inventory is on mobile launchers and even more in the case of tactical nuclear warheads.

“The Russian Federation officially claims to have 1400 nuclear warheads associated with 473 deployed strategic launchers of various types, although other estimates place that number somewhere between 1500 and 1700 warheads. The Americans, for their part, have 1,585 warheads deployed on 778 launchers.” Russia maintains another 2,000+ tactical nuclear weapons (Iskander, torpedo, aerial, artillery and cruise missile delivery vehicles) to counteract the French and UK nuclear weapons and the 300 or so US tactical nuclear weapons left in Europe.http://www.scout.com/military/warrior/story/1757643-russian-nuclear-weapons-101

Unfortunately, almost all US military leaders and politicians are linear thinkers and also cannot recognize the escalation feedback loop of an arms race (See Peter Senge- The Fifth Discipline). To ignore this warning is to abandon America to that described in the quote: “Prussia is not a country which has an army, but an army which is a country”

Many of these US generals also believe that a nuclear war can actually be won. The full scale nuclear war models that predict the nuclear winter aftermath of a nuclear war appear to have even been rejected by John Holdren, the Senior Advisor to President Barack Obama on Science and Technology or Rose Gottemoeller, the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security and the US Nuclear Weapons Council:https://fas.org/2017/01/turning-a-blind-eye-towards-armageddon-u-s-leaders-reject-nuclear-winter-studies/

Nuclear detonations create blast energy (50%), nuclear radiation (15%) and thermal radiation (35%). In the case of a full-scale nuclear war a few high altitude bursts would be used to wipe out unshielded electrical devices and electrical transmission systems. Air bursts 1-3 km height would be used to incinerate population centers. Near surface (<500m) nuclear fireballs will not only be used on hardened military targets but also nuclear reactors, spent fuel storage ponds, and nuclear waste storage tanks (e.g. 165 million gallons of high level nuclear waste at Hanford). A few weapons would also be used to take out ships and submarines at sea using hunter-killer (black hole) submarines.

Environmental effect vary with height of detonation:
(1) High altitude bursts generate oxides of nitrogen as well;
(2) air bursts generate oxides of nitrogen, soot and various oxidized products of combustion which rise by convection into the upper atmosphere yielding the nuclear winter effect. For airburst nuclear effects see: http://www.nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/;
(3) near surface detonations atomize a lot of irradiated inorganic material (e.g. soil, rock, metal, nuclear fuel rods) but less soot. This leads to a lot of localized radiation but much less upper atmosphere soot. A 20-MT surface burst is estimated to produce a crater 0.16 mi deep in soil or 0.12 mi deep in rock. The radius of the crater lip for a weapon of this yield is 0.65 mi in soil or 0.52 mi in rock. https://www.fourmilab.ch/bombcalc/instructions.html
(4) Nuclear detonation in seawater yield hot water, steam and radioactive sodium-24 with a half-life of 15 hours.

In closing, the nuclear winter aftermath of a full scale nuclear war would be far worse than even modelled by Alan Robock and Owen Brian Toon in their article:
“Self-assured destruction: The climate impacts of nuclear war” http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/RobockToonSAD.pdf due to factors they left out of their model. Besides, the dead would not have to suffer like the billions of survivors who would generally suffer a slow death from years of global cooling, disease and radiation poisoning.

Well done Scott! That’s the type of investigative reporting that confirms our perceptions of what the military-industrial-financial complex is all about – money! It also exposes the murky dealings and use of symbolic associations (academia, science) to lend respectability to fake news.

“Before I read the report, I checked to see what is the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists?”

The Bulletin is no longer what they used to be. It was started during the psychotic mccarthy times to provide a platform for people to discuss nuclear issues in a rational way, away from the war mongering propaganda. One of the people associated with their start was Albert Einstein, btw. Up till the mid 1990’s, their magazine was a valuable resource for people to find factual information on nuclear issues.

With the passing of the last person of those who founded the organization in the mid 1990’s, they went the way of most respected academic organizations in the usa, and the west in general. They were taken over by rightwing propagandists more interested in supporting the views of the zionazi and fascist corporate power structure.

“US President-elect Donald Trump has called for the country to expand its nuclear weapons capabilities until the world “comes to its senses” – a signal he may support costly efforts to modernise the aging US nuclear arsenal.

Maintaining and modernising the arsenal is expected to cost about $1 trillion dollars over 30 years, according to independent estimates.”

It will cost a lot more than that. Trump was consistent about increasing american nuclear war fighting ability. This boils down to nuclear dominance and first strike capability, the only goals the usa has pursued.

Nuclear weapons do NOT work….. never have. Ever since the fire bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was made into an atom bomb propaganda story the World (average person) has been fooled and cowed by the threat of nuclear weapons.
If nuclear weapons worked (especially small tactical ones) why have they NEVER been used? Why has every other obscene weapon been used but NOT nuclear ones? Why has Israel never used nuclear weapons against it’s non-nuclear Middle East neighbours? Simple…. they don’t work.

I beg your pardon Your Lordship! So, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were fire-bombed… And many people kept on dying from radiation for many years after the event, or was it burns? Or perhaps you are confusing that with the incineration of Dresden, Hamburg and other German cities? (I keep on mentioning this to remind the newer generation of Germans of the barbarity of Yanks and Brits war crimes against their kin. They only remember the raping of German women by Russian soldiers – many of whom were severely punished – against specific orders by the Soviet commanders and leadership to respect the civilian population, a far cry from the systematic and institutional genocide against the Russian civilian population).

I see no need to explain anything. I posted the links above as pertinent info RE Hiroshima/Nagasaki, and took it for granted that people in here study anything at their own dicretion, as is, and then evt. draw conclusions on their own.

Links are some of the info from one of my databases re. research into the matter years back, after I saw a photo from the center blast site, that were in total dis harmony with what the official narrative was (and is).

So the question was. What if?? And the known fact that the bigger the lie (especially if repeated for decades), the more people tend to believe it, and it becomes “consensus” (think the “Holocaust” for starters).

Both the forensic and circumstantial evidence one can extract by studying these few documents convinced me at the time that it was a hoax, false-flag etc. with strategic and geo-political goals in mind. (however confused they might have been at the time).

Narrative and consensus in all scientific fields are infested with assumptions on assumptions, often based on brilliant brains break-through science “law of gravity”, even though valid as a significant force, the extrapolation into being THE major power defining celestial objects and our understanding of the universe is a classical example of brain washing and wide-spread cognitive dissonance. (Mr. Newton did not know anything about electricity, as it wasn’t “invented” in his time).

So, History, ancient/contemporary, as well as geology, astronomy is infested with false (deliberately and not) info on which western society base it’s values, beliefs, and when proved wrong again and again by real independent scientist, it usually takes at least 50 years before any textbook will be altered (if ever). and then only in small steps.

When I post on this blog with the heading “For educational purposes only”, that is exactly what it is.

I’m not on any mission to convince anybody of anything, but do feel some sort of responsibility to share info, when pertinent.

Consumption, analysis and digestion is entirely up to each individual.

How many hours one has studied and analyzed whatever is completely irrelevant. I assumed as much from day one of being here.

As for what you said in general I agree, but not for nukes.
There are other things which are indeed more likely to be a hoax.
One that I cannot even speak out (even though it nevertheless was extremely evil in every case, so numbers and methods don’t really matter, that’s why talking about it is pointless).

quick follow-up: Over the years I noticed that various manners in which secret services attempt to ban/hide the truth.
One of those is 1:1 debunking (and even killing those who authored really true youtube channels)..

But another one is that they intentionally invent and suddenly massively spread utter nonsense.
The Flat-Earth crap is one such example.
And I would sort the nukes-hoax theory into the same box.

for the assorted lies, disinfo etc on so-called nuclear weapons, although it’s unlikely you’ll do any reading or checking, judging by your comments.

If anyone here wants a 3 1/2 hour documentary on the myth of the Cold War, nukes etc, and in particular how Jews did it (as with 9/11, the Holohoax, ‘AIDS’, etc etc) watch ‘Lords of the Nukes’ in Youtube & revise your mental map of the post-1945 world. Many many book extracts, videos, newsreel film, comments, drawings. More documents than most documentaries.

The neocon warmongers would do well to listen to the words of (Field Marshall) 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, in his preface to the Life World Library book “Russia,” published in 1968….” we in the West must avoid the military aspects of what is commonly called “brinkmanship”.

My final reflection on reading this book is that I am unable to agree with the conclusion in the penultimate paragraph, which says: “If you want peace, prepare for war.” A better slogan would be: “If you want peace, UNDERSTAND war.”

Today, war between East and West would be nuclear war, which would have only one result – the destruction of Western civilization, and Eastern civilization too. The catastrophe must be avoided if it is humanly possible to do so with honour.

We simply must find a way to “live and let live” with the East, led by Russia, avoiding all rigidity of thought, meeting the Russians more than halfway, visiting each other’s countries – while at the same time ensuring the overall security and vital interests of the Western world. It is surely better to negotiate than to threaten! “

How did it go in “FAILSAFE” the movie? Yes, this old film is forgotten, but Henry Fonda does an ok job in it… In said film we are told that when one vaporizes a city, be it New York or Moscow… if at that moment you are on the land-line telephone with somebody in said cities, and not in said cities, you will hear the other fellow’s telephone squeal as it melts… The film had the US ambassador on the roof of the about to be vaporized US embassy in Moscow…

My point is that the whole point of vaporizing a city is to fix the reality so that the owners of that city, that state, cannot avail themselves of the services of said city – in other words a vaporization cannot be a secret. It also means that the city no longer has to be defended, so it is a stupid thing to do…

And the paybacks are rougher than any transient “advantage” – it really pisses people off, and they have memories…

Okay, I have to admit I am not as intelligent as the writer of the article or can I write as many words as the other responders to the article. However, that said: The article as I understand it (speaking of the article from the concerned Scientists) was about the U.S. fielding weapons which might cause ti Russians or Chinese to perceive that they had less time to respond to what they think might be a nuclear missile attack. Whether the miracle fuse works or not is irrelevant. If a nuclear war is brought on by plan or accident is irrelevant. The end is the same.

I have one unspeakable question. One of most dangerous if the enemy gets hold of the idea. But….what about extending the idea of a first preemptive strike carried out by Russia and China?
Dont we need some public offensive analyses on how China and Russia could get away with taking out McCain, Tusk, Soros family and the old Lady in one shot, and still survive and secure our Russian, Chinese and Persian values?
I know it would feed the fakes about the red threats and the muslim threats, but since nobody in Europe, Canada and Australia reacts to the increasing crowd of lunatics and militarisation in their lapdog governments, it would make it a more 2 sided discussion.
Isnt there a feeling that West need some painful slap over the fingers…….for freedom?

A winnable nuclear war – yeah right. I have argued elsewhere that the concept of a military theory designed to give a bloodless victory based upon technical criteria and taking human beings out of the loop, has a long and disastrous history. In 1916 British and French military planners and theorists drew up a plan to end world war one with a definitive battle which would destory the German army entrenched in in Eastern France. There was to be a massive artillery bombardment which would smash the German front lines and then the Anglo-French forces would simply walk in and the whole thing would be finished in a few mopping-up operations. As it turned out British casualties on the first day numbered 60,000 with 20,000 – some walk-over this! The battle carried on for several more months with a few hundred metres of blood-soaked ground won and a half a million casualties. This was just one of the examples of harebrained military schemes which have been manifest for centuries. It would be easy to cite a whole litany, but I can’t be bothered. The whole concept is idiotic, particularly when it is untested and untestable.

Does the Strangelove victory school imagine that the Russians and Chinese are just going to sit around and wait to be massacred? They will assuredly take counter-measures and this means there will be unknown inputs going into the military equation. And besides things have a habit of going wrong. They certainly did for the British artillery barrage at the Somme where the Infantry lost its co-ordination with the creeping barrage.

It also seems strange that these omniscient scientists have forgotten about a nuclear winter which would certainly follow a nuclear conflict. End result – Human extinction.

So if I understood correctly on what’s relevant (not talking about media noise) and what’s changed here:

-previously SSBN nukes had less accurate fuzes and needed to detonate at higher altitudes, which is insufficient to knock out a silo

-“super fuze” is more accurate capable of detonating later, lower to the ground capable of knocking out a silo

If true, this is a serious destabilizing issue. It could mean we’re much closer to an accidental war than ever before as silo based heavy R-36 and Topol-M can’t be afford to be lost on the ground. MIRV’ed Yars are mostly mobile and thus most of them remain a very potent second strike. Still, Russia needs to satellite cover surrounding oceans ASAP.

Why do I say we are closer to war than ever before? Because now, for BOTH sides, the trigger to start it is getting lower!

Yes, cortisol, you understand it correctly. Anything that puts a nation’s ‘best’ weaponry at risk heightens the tendency to shoot-first or makes for a twitchy trigger-finger. The bad guys hope to force a ‘submission’ with the new super-fuze. They do not understand the ‘cat-backed-into-a-corner’ reaction. (On the other hand, armageddon-types hope to trigger WWIII and provoke “God” to step in…)

If the new fuse mechanism lurers the politicians to try a pre emptive, this might work against them. Each side has a limited number of nuclear warheads. If the missiles hit and destroy the silo, then it is one for one, If Russia gets the missiles away before the attack arrive, then the pre emptive strike only hits empty wasteland and the US would now be in all sorts of trouble.

In the same vein, the question becomes, not as Washington/Hollywood thinks, who has the biggest gun, but what will the injured party do once the big gun has expended it’s ammo. They may be more capable of hitting their target, however some will miss. Some weapons will be undetected and never shot at at all. And not even considered is the fact that the mess in Ukraine and Syria has so steeled the general population that there will be no surrender. It will be a fight to the last man. Once the Empire’s plan A does not bring political submission, they will find themselves in a battle to save their own skins. Most of their soldiers, unless already weakened to the point of mindless obedience, will abandon the cause and the Empire will be face to face with it’s own extinction. At that point all craziness will set in and every evil in its arsenal will be let loose. Let us pray that God will have mercy and spare us.

I too am quite confident that the Empire’s soldiers will run at the first or second shot/blood.
Like the Golem armies of the George Lucas fantasies/social engineering-tainments, only worse.
Those Golem were programmed to die without a single thought.
American and NATO troops know, deep down, who they have been tricked into serving.

I think russia with it’s world class air defense systems needs not be overly concerned about this super fuze tech.if the us were to target russia’s silo based nukes in a suprise attack,russia would still have it’s mobile systems to hit back with,and they are super lethal!

Ok…so I read the piece by Kristensen et al about the ‘super fuze’ technology…

First a note about the previous discussion about the credibility of the authors…Postol is a distinguished physicist and has done some good work in debunking the largely staged ‘successful’ test flights for the ballistic missile defense over many years…the other guys I don’t know…

Now to the article itself…I am rather surprised at how sloppy this piece is…I will get to the details of that in a moment…

But first a basic point about missile guidance…

As was pointed out earlier in this thread the reentry vehicle or warhead is on a fixed trajectory once it separates from the rocket…it is basically a glider with no ability to change course…

So the only way to get the most energy as close to the target as possible is to have the ability to detonate the fuse before it overshoots the target…

It is important to note that this only works when the missile error is an overshoot not an undershoot …if it is short of the target anyway…it would only make matters worse to detonate beforehand…

This is an important point because the concept of circular error probable is a diameter around a target bullseye…so the warhead has as much chance of undershooting…at which point the super fuse is useless…as it does of overshooting…

So with this new super fuse…the idea is to aim for an overshoot instead of right at the target…the problem with this is that you are now also increasing the chance for an off to the side miss…

The author doesn’t seem to grasp this simple bit of geometry…

…’This shift in the down-range aim point will result in a very high percentage of warheads that overfly the target detonating in the lethal volume…’

So you are now aiming at a point on the down-range CEP circle as your bullseye…and if we draw the 100 meter diameter CEP around that new ‘overshoot’ bullseye…if we call the overshoot direction the x axis…and the side direction the y axis…then obviously changing the bullseye to 100 meters down-range of the actual target…is also going to add 50 meters on each side as well…unless you are completely sure that your warhead trajectory in the x axis is right on the bullseye plane…

Of course that’s not the way it works…the warhead is just as likely to be off to the left or right as it is to overshoot or undershoot…

The result of aiming for a point 100 meters downrange of the target obviously means you have increased your chances of missing off to the side…you can easily sketch this by placing a circle with a center point…and then placing your compass point directly on that circle anywhere ‘down range’ of the center point and drawing radii…in other words your CEP radius now can start anywhere on the semicircle down range of the original center point…

It makes no sense…

But the real shocker is how the warhead figures out at precisely what point in time it needs to hit the detonator…on a vehicle going 7000 meters per second…

The article tells us…

‘…a radar-updated, path-length compensating fuze … that could adjust for trajectory errors and significantly improve the ability to destroy a target. This was an early and sophisticated use of artificial intelligence in a weapon…’

Well yeah…that’s why ‘artificial’ intelligence is called such…not exactly like ‘real’ intelligence…

Now here we get to the head-slapper moment…you’re going to put a radar in an ICBM…?

Why not just make it gps radio controlled for the ultimate in ‘precision’…?…and then you can have the Iranians commandeer your missile in midair with a bit of clever electronic gimmickry…like they did with that US spy drone they plucked out of midair a couple of years ago and gently landed her right in downtown Tehran…?

Actually this is more knee-slapper than head-slapper…if this is how US rocket scientists think then they need very little help in digging their own graves…

There is a very good reason that ICBMs use completely self-contained guidance systems that do not rely on any radio frequency transmissions…RF can be jammed…or even hijacked…

So here is how this ‘super’ fuse works…the author states clearly that once separated from the rocket ‘…the super-fuze measures its altitude…”

This is the only purpose of the radar…measuring its height from the ground…it is almost certainly something very similar to a radio altimeter used in aircraft to measure its height from the terrain…

‘…In this particular case, the orientation of the ellipsoid indicates that the errors leading to a miss at the target are mostly due to a mix of small discrepancies in the velocity and direction of the warheads when they are deployed from the rocket upper stage outside the atmosphere. The orientation and dimensions of this ellipse are well known to a ballistic missile designer, so the altitude measurement can provide information that leads to an estimate of the distance from the lethal volume above the target…

In other words…the altitude measurement tells the computer at precisely what moment in time to detonate…the radar cannot be used for ‘homing’ to the target itself…since it has no object to ‘lock on’ to…like a surface to air missile locking onto an airplane…since radar only detects moving objects…[a radar altimeter simply bounces off the terrain…]

Well I certainly hope they have made a corresponding technical breakthrough to make this the world’s first jam-proof radar…otherwise it could be a very bad day for any incoming Tridents…

The US is already up in arms about Russian electronic warfare capabilities…

You know those neat noise-canceling headsets…?…well they tune in to the frequency of the noise and then they generate the same signal to your ears but out of phase…so the two cancel each other out…

In jamming this is used the same way…to ‘read’ the frequency of the enemy missile’s radar…and then bounce back a signal that makes it miss…who knows…some clever dude might even figure out how to make it do a U turn and go and hit the plane that fired it…?

Isn’t electronics wonderful…?

And that’s why you don’t put a radio on ICBMs boys and girls…

These beasts use incredibly precise gyroscopes which measure any and all accelerations in all axes of the vehicle…and if you know the precise location where you started…and the precise location of where you want to know…then you will where you are going with absolutely no radio whatsoever…or any other reference to outside objects…

Only difference is that a sub launch needs to get its own bearings first…since it’s out at sea…so they use Astro Inertial Guidance…which takes a position of a heavenly body as a dead reckoning reference…

So putting a radio on an ICBM sounds like an incredibly hare-brained idea…

Also the author is a little sloppy about Russia’s early warning capabilities…the Oko satellites have been in service the early ’70s…true there is not a full constellation at present…but the first bird of the new EKS system went up in 2015…

Also…Russia has nearly finished a vast modernization of its ground-based early warning radars…the Voronezh has range out to 10,000 km and can track 500 objects simultaneously…and these are spread across the vast geographical footprint of Russia…

This geographical fact is also an advantage that is not always obvious to the layman…but is well known to strategic missile folks…Russia straddles nearly half the globe in girth…11 time zones…if you do the actual geometry of missile flight paths…it becomes clear that even if you launch first…they can hit you before a lot of your rockets will even get to their targets…

An ICBM with a radio altimeter is not going to change that geographical fact…

[Sidebar: active radar homing has been used on some medium range ballistic missiles…including the Pershing 2…the Soviet R27 K and several Chinese missiles…but these are not strategic weapons where failure is not an option…]

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